by Bobby Adair
Somewhere outside my pie slice-shaped dormitory room, the residents of the silo fort were making muted noises, doing whatever they did in the morning. The sound of Murphy’s deep breathing wasn’t in the room. He had to have gotten up before me and gone outside.
The smell of bacon and maybe eggs, coffee, and something baking crept through the pillow’s thick foam innards and tempted me to give up on extra sleep. An odor, a terribly familiar one, a scent I’d have preferred never to smell again, seeped in with the smoky bacon aroma.
Burning flesh.
Too many gruesome images were connected to that smell in my recollections. I shuddered and tried to cram all of that into the part of my memory that I liked to pretend didn’t exist.
That was interrupted when I got the feeling that I wasn’t alone.
I jerked up to a sitting position, knife in hand, feet on the floor.
Two blonde girls, kids, one maybe twelve, the other six, stood watching me.
Kids?
Even if they hadn’t been strangely observing me while I slept, I’d still have been surprised. Children were no longer a common sight in the world.
I settled my gaze on the tall one and asked, “What?”
The little one squirmed and grinned. “We need to know your name.”
My name? That was unexpected.
The little one said, “For the book.” She giggled and squirmed some more.
“The book?” I asked.
The tall one held up a hardbound journal wrapped in flower-printed cloth, with gold edges on the pages and a tiny lock. Not entirely enthusiastic, maybe a little bit embarrassed, she said, “It’s our job.”
“Roll call?” It was a guess that seemed bad even as I said it.
The little one giggled. The tall one smiled and rolled her eyes.
“We’re historians,” said the little one, taking time to sound out each syllable as though she was getting comfortable with a new, big word.
“Historians?” I asked, smiling to indulge what I guessed was a fantasy game.
"We have to add your name, or you won't be in history," she told me.
“I’m Zed Zane. What are your names?”
The tall one said, “I’m Khyla, and this is Kinsley."
“Write it down,” Kinsley urged Khyla. She looked at me and giggled again. “We’re sisters.”
“Ah.” I nodded, feeling like I should have guessed, but with a three or four year age difference, kids that size don’t tend to look a lot alike.
Khyla opened her book and put pen to paper.
Kinsley proudly said, “I write in the book, too. We take turns.”
“Really.” What else was I supposed to say? Good job? I wasn’t used to dealing with kids.
“Are you staying for Thanksgiving dinner?” Kinsley asked. “If you are, we have to write it down.”
“Thanksgiving?” I asked. “When’s that?”
“Today.” Khyla waggled her pencil in the direction of the door. “Isaac went turkey hunting but couldn’t find any. We’re having chicken.”
“You’re kidding me.” The morning was turning surreal. Was it possible I was still dreaming? “Is today really Thanksgiving?”
“Yep.” Kinsley nodded her head with too much emphasis. Her corn-silk hair flopped around her ears and she folded her arms across her chest.
Khyla nodded. “We keep the calendar, too.” She leaned forward with her journal and showed me a page. It displayed the month, day, and year, as well as a pretty little horn of plenty for the holiday. Khyla had already written a good deal on the two facing pages.
“Busy day?” I asked.
“They came last night.” She half smiled and said. “You know.”
I nodded. ‘They’ had to have been the Whites chasing Murphy and me.
Khyla said, “They’re still down there.”
I tensed. “The Whites?”
“The infected.” Her face turned sad for a brief second.
“How many? A lot?” I worried that more had come during the night.
“No,” she said.
I relaxed. Billy and his people seemed more than able to handle the ones that had come the night before. “You put that kind of information in your book?”
Khyla looked at Kinsley. Kinsley grinned widely and said, “Whatever we think is important.”
“I see.”
“And anything they tell us to put in the history,” added Khyla.
“They?” I asked.
“The adults,” answered Khyla. “My dad said one day people will read it and it will be their history.”
“We’ll be famous.” Kinsley grinned proudly.
With shy enthusiasm, Khyla said, “It’s our contribution.”
“I think it’s important,” I replied. I guess I even believed it.
After putting my name in their book, the girls hurried out of the room, leaving me feeling a little bit shortchanged. I thought they might ask me about some of the things that I’d done and seen. I’d have deferred the question to Murphy, but still, it would have been nice to have been asked. Instead, I felt left out, one of nearly seven billion forgotten infected, an insignificant remnant of a lost civilization.
I put on my boots, tucked my knife beside my calf, and slid my machete into my belt. I had no sheath for it. That was with my clothes and bag in the Mustang that I presumed was in College Station.
I looked out the window over my bed and saw a layer of low, gray clouds hanging over miles of fields and farms. I spotted movement, too. A troop of Whites running along one of their snaking paths was coming toward the silos. A wisp of black smoke floated by the window. All of those infected at the bottom of the ladder were still burning from the night before. That explained the smell that was tainting the tantalizing aroma of cooking bacon.
The sounds of people moving around in nearby rooms brought a familiar comfort that turned almost immediately to trepidation.
That casual commotion had no place in the post-virus world.
Murphy and I had developed quiet habits. When we walked we did it in a way that kept our steps silent. When we moved things or opened doors, we did it while making as little noise as possible. And when we spoke, we mostly talked in low tones that could only be heard between us and wouldn’t carry.
The people outside my door were making the kind of noise that pre-virus people blared as they chattered their way through a world brimming with a cacophony of machines—grinding, chugging, humming, squealing, and blasting.
Did they have it so good up here on the silos they didn’t need to sneak through life on quiet mouse feet?
Had Murphy and I stumbled upon a pocket of old normalcy?
I was jealous.
I took another long scan across the miles of fields and turned to leave my quarters. I followed my nose into a common area at the center of a ring of dorm rooms that had been constructed around the perimeter of the silo’s flat roof. As had been explained the night before, boards from disassembled houses in Creepy Town down below had been used to construct the dwellings on top of the silos.
The roof of one silo was dedicated for sleeping quarters. On the roof of the next silo were large common areas, a library, a kitchen, and dining room. One held chicken coops, and a section had been set aside for some pigs. They had a smokehouse next to the pigpen—kind of morbid for the pigs. The structures on the roof of yet another silo was still under construction.
At over fifty feet in diameter, the flat silo roofs provided a lot of safe space from marauding Whites.
A catwalk across the top of all five silos served as a hallway, terminating at the fortification across the silo at the end—the one with the ladder Murphy and I had climbed. Behind the wall on that silo, rooms had been built to store weapons and there was a workshop with metal and woodworking tools, storage for canned foods and other things the silo dwellers had scrounged.
A few people passed through the hall toward the construction area, looking every bit like they were on the
ir way to work. Each greeted me with a nod and a “Good morning.”
When I walked into the kitchen and common area, I saw a teenage boy, a man, and a woman preparing the meal. The woman looked at me, and said, “Breakfast will be ready in about ten minutes, so don’t wander too far.” The three chuckled. I smiled, guessing that was silo humor.
More people were congregated in a lounge area, sitting on couches, talking intently about some papers laying on a coffee table between them. A couple of them glanced at me, but didn’t seem disturbed by my white skin and bald head.
I went outside and passed between the storage buildings and through a gate in the steel wall. On the top level of the tower structure on the far side of the rampart silo, I spotted Murphy, Billy, and Isaac. They were talking and pointing at things far enough away that I could only guess what they might be.
From down on the ground at the foot of the silo, I heard other sounds—Whites. They were feeding and squabbling. Nobody on the tower appeared to be concerned about the Whites.
“Mornin'," Isaac called down to me.
“Mornin'," said Billy.
“Hey, dude.” Murphy waved me to come up to the platform where the three of them were having their conference.
The tower stood three stories above the top of the silo. On each story was a platform with an expanded metal mesh floor on a steel framework, big enough for eight or nine people to stand comfortably around. I could only make rudimentary guesses as to the original purpose that the platforms served for the silos, but large pipes—I assumed for moving grain—ran up and angled through the platforms. Intermixed with the pipes were machines that, again, did things about which I could only guess. The sides of the platforms had been fortified with welded sheet metal and steel plates, much like the rest of the first silo.
Also built into the tower was a swiveling boom with a block and tackle hanging on loops of steel cable, wound back to a large spool on the tower’s second level. That explained how the silo clan had been able to hoist everything up.
If nothing else, this band of survivors was industrious.
I climbed the zigzagging stairs until I reached the top.
Billy was pointing to a water tower that had to be at least seven or eight miles away. To Murphy, he said, “You can just make out the outpost we built atop that tower.”
Murphy shrugged. “Maybe I see a rusty spot but I can’t tell. It’s too far away.”
“We got two people there, too,” said Billy. “All three towers got radio and solar chargers for the batteries.”
“Lasers, too,” added Isaac in his deep drawl.
“Zombie lasers?” Murphy laughed.
“To signal,” said Billy. “Just in case.” He reached into a small metal cabinet and showed Murphy some high-powered laser pointers they’d scavenged from somewhere.
Murphy looked at me and said, “They’re trying to convince us to stay.” He grinned. “Mostly me, probably. I told ‘em you had a stick up your ass about Mark and had to knock him off before you could resolve your existential crisis.”
Isaac laughed. “Whatever that means.”
I leaned over the top edge of the wall around the platform so I could get a look at the ladder at the base of the silo. Dead Whites lay mangled and burned, some still smoldering. Among them, noisy Whites fed. I figured it had to be said, just in case, “You guys know you’ve got Whites down there, right?”
“Course,” said Billy. “Got some more headed this way.” He pointed east. “Back that way. A pretty large group of ‘em.”
"How many?" I squinted at the horizon, wondering if it was the small group I’d spotted from my room, or if it was the large group that had chased Murphy and me the day before.
“A hundred, maybe,” said Isaac.
Billy pointed at the smoke trickling into the sky from the smoldering bodies below. “That’s probably why they’re coming.”
“Do we need to do something?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Don’t seem like the ones down at the bottom have any interest in us up here.”
“They don’t remember long,” said Isaac. “Ones still alive prolly forgot us.”
Shaking my head, I said, “I’m not sure that’s completely true.”
“Least ways,” said Isaac, “we ain’t gonna do nuthin’.”
“Nope,” Billy agreed. “We’ll sit tight up here. The healthy ones will clean up the mess down there and save us the trouble. We’ll haul the bones away later when things settle down.”
“They won’t try to come back up the ladder?” I asked.
“Prolly not,” said Billy. “If they do…” He pointed at the bin of bowling balls.
Isaac chuckled. “Long as they don’t see us, they don’t know we’re up here. We drop a bowling ball on whoever tries to climb the ladder. Ones at the bottom are too dumb to know it ain’t rainin’ bowlin’ balls. Far as they know, that kinda stuff just happens. They don’t think nuthin’ of it.”
“Except last night,” I said, “They were chasing me and Murphy. That’s why they didn’t give up.”
“That’s right,” said Isaac. “They was chasin’ you, not climbing a ladder for no reason.”
“Got it.” Not wanting to get into an argument about infected behavior with the nice folks who’d probably saved my life the night before, I figured I’d find a better way to talk about it at a later time. “So you guys are good up here? You can stay a while?”
“You saw how much grain we got in these silos,” said Billy. “We don’t never need to go down if we don’t want to.”
“What about water?” Murphy asked.
Billy pointed at a row of three windmills, the kind spread across the ranches in Texas to pump water out of the aquifers and into the stock ponds. “We got ‘em piping water up here. We got everything we need. For stuff we want, we take a chance and go down.” Billy swung his finger across the horizon, pausing at each lookout. “When we’re clear, we go down and search for luxuries and such. Plenty of feral pigs around and plenty of cattle, too. No shortage of meat.”
I felt jealous again. My attempt to set up a post-apocalyptic commune of survivors at Sarah Mansfield’s mansion had failed. Billy, Isaac, and the other people on the silos were thriving.
Still, I was getting bored with hearing about how well the silo people had set themselves up. I had things to do. I spun around and looked for water towers and other silos on the horizon. I pointed northwest. “You have lookouts that way?”
Billy leaned close to my side and pointed so that I could see down the length of his arm, to where his finger landed on a couple of fat tanks with streaks of rust on weathered paint. He said, “See there, on top of that one on the left?”
I saw a brownish speck, but I couldn’t tell what it was. “Oil tanks?”
“Liquid fertilizer,” said Billy. “We got two fellas in that observation tower on top.” He turned to the south and pointed at a water tower taller and closer than the fertilizer tanks. “Got a couple there, too.”
“Did you guys see that big horde of naked Whites that went through that way over the past few days?”
Murphy groaned.
Billy nodded. “Ate a good many cattle when they passed. Most of ‘em I ‘spect.”
“Do your lookouts know where they are?” I asked.
Billy pointed northwest. “Seen ‘em out that way when they settled down last night. They were gone when the sun came up this morning. Moved on.”
Isaac cocked his head toward the ladder running down the side of the tower. “’cept stragglers. Still plenty of ‘em ‘round.” He pointed northwest. “Headed that way, mostly. Lookin’ to catch up, I guess.”
I took another peek at the Whites down below. Habit. “You guys have a pretty good idea where all the Whites are in the area, as well as which direction they’re moving? You certainly seem to have the infrastructure in place for it.”
“Got to,” said Billy, “If we want to stay safe when we send folks out to scrounge or work
the gardens.”
“Is that where all the stuff came from in the houses down below?” Murphy asked.
“We store stuff there,” Billy told him. “Right now we got all we need. But with rodents, scavengers, infected, and the weather, it won’t be too many years from now when a good pair of jeans ‘ll be worth its weight in gold.”
“Or steaks,” laughed Isaac.
“You probably saw,” said Billy, “we got blankets, housewares, tools, pretty much anything you could think of. ‘Cept food. None of that down there. The infected would eat that right up. We store our food up here. We only keep things down there the infected won’t be interested in.”
“Mostly,” Isaac laughed in his deep rumble. “Some comes through and take anything they can find that’s shiny. Sometimes they take knives. Ya never can tell.”
“Makes sense,” said Murphy. “We saw some of that back in Austin. Right, Zed?”
I nodded but didn’t tell about my experiences with Nancy and Bubbles. Instead I asked, “Maps?”
Isaac laughed again.
“What?” I asked.
Looking at Billy, Isaac said, “Told ya.”
“Told him what?” I looked from Isaac to Billy and back again.
"I cleaned out a couple o' convenience stores." Isaac leveled an old calloused finger at Billy. "He told me I was wastin’ my time. Everybody here knows what’s ‘round. Most of us lived our whole lives here.”
“Could we get a map of the area?” I asked. “If you could show me on it where the Whites are and where they’re going, it’d sure make it a lot safer for Murphy and me to get out of here today.” I assumed Murphy was going to tag along. I looked at him. “How’s the hand?”
Murphy held it up for me to see. It looked much better. “Benadryl’s my new favorite drug.”
“Can you use it?”
“Stiff,” Murphy flexed his hand. “But it won’t slow me down.”
“You can have a map,” said Billy. “We don’t use ‘em.” He pointed at a gray-colored house at the edge of town. “Got ‘em stored down there. A stack of ‘em in a china hutch.”
That made me think of the clothes I’d stolen from their warehouse. I reached up and tugged at the collar on my jacket, deciding whether I should ask for what I’d already taken.